No rest for the weary

The question puzzled me. "Time off?" I probably have at least 30 movies to see before the end of the year — and most of them will be crammed into a two or three week period. And then I'll be writing about them. And doing the year-end best and worst lists. And video columns. And interviews.

So what was this friend talking about?

"You mean you're not going on strike?" he asked.

Suddenly, I got the picture. He had assumed that because the Writers Guild — the people who write the scripts for movies and TV shows — went on strike Monday that I would also be off-work. Writing the movies and writing about movies, however, are not the same things — and I would certainly be a lonely figure walking the picket line in Kalamazoo.

No, it will probably be at least a few months before the Writers Guild strike has any real impact on my work, although if it continues for more than a few weeks the odds are that it will affect us all.

In anticipation of a strike, the studios often stockpile films that aren't necessarily, say we say, Oscar-quality and eventually dump them into the marketplace just to give theaters something new to play. So if the strike isn't settled for months, brace yourself for an avalanche of garbage — the kinds of things that would probably have gone to straight to DVD — in 2008.

By the way, the last major walk-out by the Writers Guild in 1988 lasted a whopping 22 weeks.